I have been considering being a mechanical engineer for most of my life at this point. I have of course gone back and forth between that and other career paths, but I have always returned to the idea of mechanical engineering. At this point in my life, I think that I want to for sure go down that path of engineering, but I do not entirely know what specific field to go into. I joined this program in the hopes that I would get a better idea of what I would want to do. Now, I do not have all experience that everyone else who is a part of the program might (on account that I joined very late), but I have gained valuable experience from the program. Both the program before the internship and the actual internship have given me plenty of information and experiences.

I was late to the AASEP program and did not attend a meeting until around March, so I was only able to attend three or four meetings. From those meetings though, I was able to get plenty of information about business and how to properly conduct myself in a business environment. While a lot of it was not necessarily engineering related it still was valuable information to have and I can use for the rest of my life. While there was not necessarily a lot of engineering information going on (from what I experienced at least), the information that was there was eye opening. When I first joined the program, I was still between engineering and forensic science. I knew that forensic was not a very easy field to get into due to there not being many positions that would be open and would probably require moving somewhere to get a job, which was not great but I did not know anything about the openings of being an engineer so I still held onto the idea of being a forensic scientist. When we were shown all the participating companies for the program, my reservations were completely wiped away. Being shown that there were tons of companies that were all local, gave me plenty of confidence that getting into engineering would be the right thing to do.

Now for the actual internship, that has, in a way, made me more indecisive on what path of engineering to go down. Since I was picked by the City of Akron, I have been around civil engineers, which is similar in some aspects, but in action, is different. The thing is though, that civil is not something I had considered before, but it does seem fairly interesting. I just need more information to help me make my decision. Granted, I still plan on going into mechanical engineering, but would like to feel more confident that I’m going to the field that I want. I have some time though as I have learned that college courses for civil and mechanical are similar, so I’m not very worried about it.

By: Hunter Huey